Kaby Lake And Unreal VR Editing

Overwatch Running On Intel Kaby Lake-Based, Next-Gen Dell XPS 13

This morning’s opening keynote at the annual Intel Developers Forum was rather eventful. In addition to unveiling the Project Alloy merged reality headset, the Project Aero Drone platform, and a number of maker-oriented devices, Intel also showed off its next-generation Kaby Lake-based 7th Generation Core processors and some new virtual reality editing tools built into Epic’s Unreal Engine.

Kaby Lake is the follow-up product to current, 6th Generation Skylake-based Core processors. With Kaby Lake, however, Intel is adding native support for USB 3.1 Gen 2, along with a more powerful graphics architecture for improved 3D performance and 4K video processing. Kaby Lake will also bring with it native HDCP 2.2 support and hardware acceleration for HEVC Main10/10-bit and VP9 10-bit video decoding.

To drive those points home, Intel showed off Overwatch running on a next-gen Dell XPS 13 built around a 7th Gen ULV Core i5 processor, in addition to a HP notebook smoothly playing back 4K HDR video. The game settings or resolution, video bitrate, and other details regarding the notebooks weren’t disclosed, however.

Intel also used a Broadwell-E based system to demo some cool, multi-threaded VR editing technology that was integrated into Epic’s Unreal Engine. With it, developers can now edit virtual worlds from within the actual VR environment. Watch the video embedded above to see it in action.

Notice The Status Bar At The Lower-Left Of The Window...

Intel ran the VR demo on Broadwell-E to show the benefits of the additional cores available with the processors. Re-rendering the lighting in the environment was more than 2x faster on Broadwell-E than on the Skylake-based Core i7-6700K. For developers that run similar operations many times a day, the performance benefits of Broadwell-E with multi-threaded workloads can save a significant amount of time.